Taunton City Council considers plan for solid waste transfer station

TAUNTON — The city’s long road to a solid-waste transfer station could be coming to an end.

The City Council’s committee of a whole Tuesday night heard details of a proposed transfer station that would be built by Taunton-based businessman Gil Lopes.

The owner of G. Lopes Construction Inc. and affiliate New England Recycling first submitted a site-assignment application in 2015 to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.

“We’ve been working on this since 2014,” said Lopes, who says he’s got permits from MassDEP and the city’s board of health in hand.

The final council approval step is scheduled for July 11, when the City Council will decide whether to issue a special permit for Lopes to operate the transfer station on property he owns and uses on Prince Henry Drive, situated in a corner of Myles Standish Industrial Park not far from Fremont Street.

The city council permit would specifically cover delivery of and processing of municipal solid waste, according to Joe Tutsch, G. Lopes Construction vice president.

Tutsch said the company already has the legal green light to accept and process construction and demolition waste.

Preparatory construction of the industrial park facility where G. Lopes Construction now operates its Future Fuels wood chip and sawdust business is underway, he said.

The transfer station would fill a void within the city’s trash disposal equation since WeCare Organics LLC opened its materials recovery facility on Mozzone Boulevard in 2014.

The so-called MRF can annually process and sort up to 40,000 tons of glass, metal, plastic, paper and cardboard deposited from curbside collection for future sale as reusable, manufacturing materials.

The New York state-based WeCare was to have had first dibs on building the transfer station.

The company signed a joint agreement with the city in 2012 in tandem with a Pennsylvania-based waste-to-energy development business called Interstate Waste Technologies.

Taunton’s relationship with IWT dated back to 2010, when then City Solicitor Steven Torres and the late Mayor Charles Crowley encouraged the City Council to select the company as the city’s “preferred vendor” to build an all-in-one, gasification, trash-elimination plant, that IWT said would reap the city up to $2 million per year in royalties.

The gasification facility was to have been built on a 36-acre property adjacent the industrial park — not far where Lopes plans to build his transfer station — known as the Alec Rich site.

The name was derived from the former owner, who in 2009 sold his land to the city for $2.75 million after buying it for $36,000 in 1999 from the Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant.

State environmental regulators, however, rejected the IWT gasification project — which at various times included plans to generate either electricity, ethanol or gasoline as saleable by-products — by denying it valuable tax credits.

The 2012 agreement with the city called for WeCare to build a MRF and a gasifier to eliminate all sewer-waste sludge and for IWT to build a municipal-solid-waste gasifier.

IWT was unable to use the Alec Rich site because of wetland issues, and was also blocked from using industrial park land by the Taunton Development Corporation.

When it informed the council in 2014 it was unable to secure financial backing, the city dropped IWT and handed the entire project over to WeCare.

WeCare, however, according to officials has not indicated it is interested in building a transfer station.

Lopes said he expects to open the transfer station by next October.

The move to establish a means of eliminating all curbside trash and sewer materials is predicated on the anticipated closing of the city’s landfill, which officials expect to close no later than 2020.

Even the human-waste, sewer sludge, once it has been solidified into a “cake” form, is trucked up to the landfill on West Britannia Street.

The transfer station, Lopes said, will utilize rail cars to ship non-recyclable materials out of state to other landfills and incinerators.

Lopes said there will be one train in and out of the site each day and just over 50 truck trips in and out.

The maximum daily allowed tonnage will be 1,000 tons but with an “acceptance rate” of 800 tons.

Of that amount, up to 500 tons would come from construction and demolition materials delivered by Lopes’s New England Recycling. The remaining 300 tons would be municipal solid waste that otherwise would be dropped off at the landfill.

“We’re going to be our biggest customer,” said Lopes, referring to the NER truck deliveries that will come from the company’s Winthrop Street site.

Councilor Deborah Carr went on record opposing the project: “I’m shocked the TDC (Taunton Development Corporation) doesn’t have an issue with it,” she said.

Council president Daniel Dermody, however, said the project “just makes sense to me all the way around.”

Carr, who said she’s concerned about garbage odors and trains causing traffic delays, said she’ll be on vacation the week of July 11 but will submit a letter, stating why she opposes the transfer station being located in the industrial park.